On Losing a Parent

My dad died this week.

It was unexpected, both because he’ll forever be a towering, unbreakable person in my mind and because we hadn’t talked for a long time. We sent a few texts around New Year’s, him to say he hoped we could see each other soon and me to say the same and to talk about how excited the joy monster would be to see him. He sent a few emojis back—smiley faces—and that was it. The last thing I ever heard from him. The last thing I’ll ever hear from him.

We were strangers, my dad and I. My parents split up when I was younger, and my brother and I would spend a few days a week and every other weekend at his house. While there, I’d mostly retreat to my room and read books or write choose-your-own-adventure stories on notecards that, when arranged on the floor, would spread tree-like across the hardwood. My dad and my brother would talk sports. Or they would watch sports without talking much. My dad—as his obituary says—loved everything sports related. Watching Twins games or Vikings games was his favorite, but the speculation and analysis were a close second. Would such-and-such a player really play to his potential? Were the Packers really anything to worry about this year? Could the Twins realistically hope for a .500 season? I never knew enough about the teams or the sports to participate in the conversations, and I didn’t care enough to learn. I was tiny and scrawny, with hands used to holding books and unable to palm a basketball or huck a football.

That didn’t stop me from trying, of course. I played baseball, crying in pain and with shame any time I got hit by a pitch—a semi-regular occurrence when standing in the batter’s box and watching a seventh-grade pitcher winding up. I played football, running around and getting pulverized any time I managed to catch a pass. I played basketball, riding the bench for most games because I was too uncoordinated to do much other than turn the ball over or throw up airballs.

I played every damn sport I could, in part because it was expected of just about every boy in my tiny midwestern town, but primarily because I wanted my dad to be proud of me. I wanted him to look down from the stands, where he would be watching with all the other parents, and get a chance to say, “there goes Josh! What a play!” I dreamed of him standing around the track, leaning with both arms on the chain link fence and turning to another parent to say, “just watch Josh’s kick. He’s gonna catch that kid in first.”

Like a lot of kids, I wanted my dad to be proud of me, but I wanted to do so by playing in his world. I wanted to shout victory in a language he spoke.

It didn’t work out, of course. A 90-pound wide receiver who’s afraid of getting hit and doesn’t know or care how to block doesn’t last long in football. A second baseman who never learned how to throw the ball without throwing out his shoulder isn’t destined for the big leagues (or even JV). I slunk out of every sport requiring dexterity or toughness or a violent disposition, aware that I was letting my dad down and unable to do anything about it. I stayed with cross country because running never felt like a sport, and because there was never a risk of having some big dude in pads tackle me.

I’ll never forget this one race—a cold, windy day in Minnesota and one of the few times I actually ran well. I ran a personal best of more than a minute and a half (a huge deal for me) and everything in me sung when, after the race, my dad told me how shocked he’d been to see me up in one of the lead groups. He found me after the race and said, “I was telling grandma” (my grandma came to watch that race, too) “that you’d probably be back in one of the middle packs, but then you came around that turn with the second group! I couldn’t believe it! You were flying!”

It was a performance I could never replicate, but that look of pride on his face after the race is something I’ll never forget. It sustained me—that shred of pride. I hoarded it. Still do.

Mostly, though, I think I was something of a disappointment to him. Nose in a book, prone to crying and fits of dramatics, and uninterested in everything he found interesting, I was a person he wouldn’t have been friends with or known if we hadn’t been related. As I got older and started doing plays and band and speech, that space between us only grew. I had finally found something I loved—and something I was good at, but I couldn’t help but feel his responses to any of my successes were half-hearted, the kinds of congratulations you might offer to an acquaintance who did something they’re clearly excited about but that you just don’t understand. When my partner and I got first at the state speech tournament our senior year, he said, “that’s awesome, bud,” in a distant sort of way. He wanted to support me, I think, but just didn’t get it. Just didn’t get me.

We were like strangers and only grew further apart. We started talking only a few times a year. Then maybe once a year. A strained phone call here, a quick meet up for Christmas there. Each time, both of us tried our best—me asking wilder and more dated questions about sports: was Cristian Guzman playing pretty well? He’s playing alright, but he doesn’t play for the Twins anymore. How’s that thorn-in-our-side Brett Favre doing? He retired. A few years ago.

He tried, too: so what kind of thing am I studying now? English. Still English. What’s the school up there in Virginia like? It’s West Virginia, and the school is good! I like my program a lot. And this will let you be a publisher? No, I’m studying to be an English professor and academic.

We just didn’t know each other, and I couldn’t help but feel like every step I took in my life was one further from him. He, a former garbage man and now an insulation guy, his favorite activities bowling and watching sports—me, a grad student focused on Early Modern literature, my favorite activities writing and reading.

Maybe that’s why I never really told him about my writing. He wasn’t a reader, my dad, but I had this worry that he would buy my book and read it and see just how far apart we were. He’d see a book written by a bisexual son who never came out to him, featuring women sailing an impossible sea of grass and magic burning up from charred formations of bone and floating cities and wonderment at something as trivial, as essential, as the natural world—he’d see all of that and know me for the stranger I had become. It would be like a postcard from a different country, written in a different language, from a pen pal he’d long ago lost contact with.

He died on Monday, and since hanging up that phone call where I found out, I’ve been grieving a man I didn’t know, not nearly as well as I would have liked to, a man I don’t resemble but who was still my father. I never got his squashed nose or wide jaw, and I’m already starting to go bald while he still had a full head of hair at age 60. He was over 6’ and I’m 5’9” when I can manage proper posture. I’ve moved aimlessly between feeling numb and weeping silently. Out for a run to just feel the prairie wind and forget everything, I found myself five miles out and crouched down on the side of an empty gravel road, sobbing and thinking about the time he’d offered to fix the broken muffler on my car, which he did by tying a piece of wire around it and saying “that should do it.” A nothing memory, maybe, but mine.

I’ve been mourning what we had just as much as what we didn’t. Letting myself walk down the could’ve-been paths and paying tribute to each and every one. A dad who saw his son flourishing and felt something brighten in himself in return. A son who was taller or more athletic or more interested in a life language his father could understand. A relationship close enough to scoff at a measly single phone call in a year.

I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to say to my dad if I could get the chance. All the angry things I’d like to say. All the feelings of betrayal and shame, the rage and disappointment and sadness. All the harsh words that I fed over the years, building them from a small fire into a roaring blaze.

I’d say all that. And I’d say: let’s try again. Let me tell you who I really am, and please tell me who you are. Let me tell you about your granddaughter, who is so smart and funny and weird, just like I was. Let me tell you about this book I wrote, which you won’t like at all but which you might see the ghost of me in.

Let me tell you about me, and please tell me about you. And let’s try again.